t him something," Garth directed. "The doctor must have left you a
narcotic."

She walked with a pronounced lurch to the cabinet where Garth heard her
fumbling among the bottles, but he did not turn away from Alden. The
imbecile sounds stopped, but the lips worked ineffectively again. One of
the hands moved slowly with an apparent sanity of purpose. Garth
realized that it was motioning him back. Alden started to rise. Garth
saw his veins swell and the emaciated muscles strain as he literally
dragged himself out of the chair and braced his elbows against the
writing-table. He grasped a pencil and wrote rapidly on a piece of
paper. Garth understood, and he reached out for the sheet on which Alden
had written the words--perhaps a warning, perhaps the truth--which his
tongue had been unable to form.

"Don't touch that paper."

There was a new quality about the voice Garth could not deny. There was
no more tinkling of glass at the cabinet. He found it difficult to
credit Mrs. Alden with that clear, authoritative command. He turned
warily and looked into the muzzle of his own revolver. Mrs. Alden's
outstretched hand, he noticed, did not waver.

"What does this mean?" he cried.

"It means," she answered in a tired voice, "that if you read what is on
that paper you'll leave me no choice. I shall have to shoot."

Alden whimpered again. The paper fluttered to the floor and rested,
white and uncommunicative, beneath the table. His face set. He pointed
accusingly towards the rear window.

The gesture was clear to Garth. He knew what it meant before his eyes
followed its direction. Before he had seen, he appreciated almost
palpably the new presence in the room. At the moment it seemed
inevitable to him that the tense group should be joined by a stronger
force, the inspiration, probably, of the mysteries that had posed it,
and that worked ahead, he could not doubt, to a graver issue for Alden
and himself.

The newcomer glided from the shadows by the window and moved to Mrs.
Alden's side--huge, powerful. The cap, drawn low over his eyes, and the
thick growth about the mouth, robbed his face of expression and gave to
his actions a mechanical precision not lightly to be disturbed. He took
the revolver from the woman.

"I couldn't," she said. "He hasn't read. It won't be necessary?"

"Necessary," the man answered, "but you were right. Not in that way. It
leaves too much evidence. As the others went."

"No more death," she c